VENOM: Versatile, Adhesive, and Soft Material for Various Surface Adhesion

摘要

Obtaining a material that can stick to various smooth and rough surfaces with durability and high (dynamic) friction and normal adhesion forces is a roboticist's dream since it can allow robots to effectively move on various surfaces like living creatures (e.g., geckos). Moving in this direction, we present a VErsatile, adhesive, aNd sOft Material (VENOM) for various surface adhesion. It has been developed based on a mixture of super soft, fast cure platinum-catalyzed silicone (Ecoflex™ 00-10) and iron powder. Through our empirical investigation, we realized that VENOM with iron powder in the amount of 30% by weight of silicone produced the highest dynamic friction and normal adhesion forces compared to other ratios. We compared the performance of VENOM with other soft (sticky) materials (e.g., other silicone types and non-directional gecko-inspired material) on smooth and rough surfaces. Our experimental results show that VENOM overall has an excellent performance. It has the highest dynamic friction and adhesion forces on both surfaces, except in the case of smooth surfaces where the gecko-inspired material has the highest normal adhesion force. Although the adhesion force of VENOM on smooth surfaces is lower than the gecko-inspired material, several tests show that it has lower variance. This suggests that VENOM has better repeatable adhesive performance and durability. We believe that this simple, low-cost, dry adhesive material will be beneficial in many aspects of (soft) robotics as well as climbing robot development.